Sunday, June 15, 2008

All My Loving

Hi Everyone! I hope you're all having a great weekend!

First off, Happy Father's Day Dad! I love you and wish I was there to help you celebrate or better yet, that you were over here with me!

Yesterday, we continued our tour of Brussels. We went to the Belgian Royal Museum of Art, which is only about a ten minute walk from our apartment. The museum is composed of a couple different sections, with a modern art museum, a collection of older stuff, and then they had a visiting exhibit from Britain. The modern art collection was wonderful. I especially loved the Chagalls and the Magrittes. There was also a Picasso, which was small but pretty neat. The exhibit from Britain had some neat Rubens and Brueghels and there was one van Gogh which was from one of his earlier periods. Unfortunately, I didn't get to spend much time looking at the regular collection of art that they had because the museum was closing. In rushing through I did get to see some giant Rubens paintings and David's Death of Marat which was really cool because we had talked about this in my art history class in high school. I would like to go back and spend more time in that wing, but I guess I'll have to see how much time I have here. Maybe I'll go one afternoon when I don't have to much reading to do.

After the museum, everyone was tired so they went back and took naps and I went exploring on my own. It was really nice to get some alone time since I haven't really had much of it since arriving here. I went over to Parc de Bruxelles, which is across from the palace and used to be part of the land where the kings of Belgium would hunt. The park is fairly big and there are a couple of big fountains in the park. There were a bunch of people just strolling through the park, some joggers, and people sitting on benches enjoying their Saturday afternoon. I walked across the park and came upon the Palais de Nation, which is where the Belgian parliament meets. After exploring the park for a while, I walked back to the apartment.

Today I am just spending the day relaxing and recovering from the weekend. I'll probably do some reading for class and maybe go out and enjoy the rare Brussels sunshine at some point.

3 comments:

Hey Courtney. I believe Haley put it best that we are both vicariously living through you right now. So after you left I fell into a balck hole and now I'm out so I can now try to keep up with the global trotting stylings of Courtney Chiles.Your sunday sounds amazing. Just your average extraordinary day in Brussels.Hope all is well.

I guess Death of Marat is usually here because it was in the part of the museum with the permanent collection. I had no idea that it was here and I just stumbled upon it as I was rushing around the museum trying to see everything before I left. Go figure!